Common European Data Spaces (CEDS) are aimed at creating a single market for data across the EU that will power AI innovation. CEDS cover 14 sectors/domains and will allow secure, trustworthy data/AI models exchange between companies, public administrations etc. The Common European Language Data Space (LDS) is part of CEDS and is already made available in beta phase. The paper presents its technical design and implementation, its governance framework as well as use cases that demonstrate its value. LDS aspires to become part of the future European Language Technology ecosystem.

To strengthen competitiveness and digital sovereignty, the European Union has promoted the development of Common European Data Spaces to enable secure and interoperable data sharing between participants for various sectors. Data spaces combine technical infrastructure with governance mechanisms to ensure trust, transparency, data sovereignty and interoperability. Their operation must comply with the evolving European regulatory framework as well as contractual law. This paper presents the strategy adopted in the Language Data Space (LDS) to operationalise these requirements, focusing on its contractual framework and supporting instruments. It outlines the governing principles designed to ensure lawful, transparent, and fair data transactions while safeguarding the rights and obligations of data providers and consumers alike. It further describes the actual framework, and the recommended data sharing licences, with a particular emphasis on the LDS standard licence. Finally, it presents the automation tools designed and developed to support the relevant workflows while serving a wide range of users that have little or no knowledge of technical and legal complexities.

We introduce Llama-Krikri-8B, a cutting-edge Large Language Model tailored for the Greek language, built on Meta’s Llama 3.1-8B. Llama-Krikri-8B has been extensively trained on high-quality Greek data to ensure superior adaptation to linguistic nuances. With 8 billion parameters, it offers advanced capabilities while maintaining efficient computational performance. Llama-Krikri-8B supports both Modern Greek and English, and is also equipped to handle polytonic text and Ancient Greek. The chat version of Llama-Krikri-8B features a multi-stage post-training pipeline, utilizing both human and synthetic instruction and preference data, by applying techniques such as MAGPIE. In addition, for evaluation, we propose three novel public benchmarks for Greek. Our evaluation on existing as well as the proposed benchmarks shows notable improvements over comparable Greek and multilingual LLMs in both natural language understanding and generation as well as code generation.

The European Language Grid (ELG) is a cloud platform for the whole European Language Technology community. While the EU project that developed the platform successfully concluded in June 2022, the ELG initiative has continued. This article provides a description of the current state of ELG in terms of user adoption and number of language resources and technologies available in early 2024. It also provides an overview of the various activities with regard to ELG since the end of the project and since the publication of the ELG book, especially the co-authors’ attempt to integrate the ELG platform into various data space initiatives. The article also provides an overview of the Digital Language Equality (DLE) dashboard and the current state of DLE in Europe.

The Common European Language Data Space (LDS) is an integral part of the EU data strategy, which aims at developing a single market for data. Its decentralised technical infrastructure and governance scheme are currently being developed by the LDS project, which also has dedicated tasks for proof-of-concept prototypes, handling legal aspects, raising awareness and promoting the LDS through events and social media channels. The LDS is part of a broader vision for establishing all necessary components to develop European large language models.

The European Language Equality (ELE) project develops a strategic research, innovation and implementation agenda (SRIA) and a roadmap for achieving full digital language equality in Europe by 2030. Key component of the SRIA development is an accurate estimation of the current standing of languages with respect to their technological readiness. In this paper we present the empirical basis on which such estimation is grounded, its starting point and in particular the automatic and collaborative methods used for extending it. We focus on the collaborative expert activities, the challenges posed, and the solutions adopted. We also briefly present the dashboard application developed for querying and visualising the empirical data as well as monitoring and comparing the evolution of technological support within and across languages.

Europe is a multilingual society, in which dozens of languages are spoken. The only option to enable and to benefit from multilingualism is through Language Technologies (LT), i.e., Natural Language Processing and Speech Technologies. We describe the European Language Grid (ELG), which is targeted to evolve into the primary platform and marketplace for LT in Europe by providing one umbrella platform for the European LT landscape, including research and industry, enabling all stakeholders to upload, share and distribute their services, products and resources. At the end of our EU project, which will establish a legal entity in 2022, the ELG will provide access to approx. 1300 services for all European languages as well as thousands of data sets.